Ingmar

Hi Hangman, thanks for your reply - unfortunately I don't quite get, what your screens are showing, as you didn't mention how you arrived at them. I assume the left shows an export based on CMYK with Fogra-39-profile applied - and the right shows an export based on RGB? I understand, that the main message here is: no matter how you look at it, both parts always show identical color-values. But I'm curious: which software does have such a neat display of the color-values? Thanks for your input!

Thanks Lee for your reply! Thanks to you I now can look at the cmyk-values myself in my old Acrobat-2017 version. And I have to confirm, that the cmyk-values match. Nonetheless, in pdf-XChange the colors are shown as differing RGB-Values (s. attached screenshots). My printer only provided the original information that colors differ and that there seemed to be some kind of partly transparent layer on top of the linked parts, that created differing colors. I will look now look into the original cover-files in greater detail. Maybe I was not consistent in applying the color profile in all documents. For now I am glad to conclude, that this seems to be a conversion bug on the side of pdfXchange rather than an exporting bug on the affinity side. Thank you for your help and restoring my faith in the affinity suite (I initated the change to affinity in our department...).

I create covers for books which consist of 4 parts: a frontpage, a backpage, a middlepart (the spine of the book), and a Box creating margins arround the group of the other 3 parts. In order to achieve consistent results a use a 2-page documument with masterpage for front- and backpage and another 1-page document for the spine. I then mount those in a 3rd, oversized document or Artboard using the placement-option (linking to the 2 files for front/back and spine). After adjusting them so they form the correct shape, I group these 3 objects and finally add a layer beneath the group with a larger rectangle filled in the same color as the rest of the files (creating margings around the grouped objects. When exporting to pdf my printing-house tells me, that there are color-differences between the embedded pages and the margin-rectangle and when checking this in pdf-XChange I do also see different colors (unfortunately it only displays RGB-Values, but all of the files are in CMYK/8). Opening the same pdf in affinity designers DOES not show any difference between the different parts. I am on windows10 machines and have reproduced this problem in Affinity 2.3, 2.4 and even in the latest version of 1. All documents are in CMYK/8 with "coated FOGRA-39" profile applied (pdf-Export also with CMYK/8 and ICC-profile "coated FOGRA-39" enabled. Problem persists if switching to designer to mount the parts. In order to illustrate the problem I created a simplified version and attach 3 files: the file containing the spine (middle.afpub), the file containing the a link to the spine file (right side) and a copy of the layoutpage from the spine file (using clipboard) on the left. The 3rd file is the exported pdf. Comparing the rgb-values with a direct pdf-export from the spine file (not attached here) shows the same values as the clipboard-copy, implying that the problem lies with the linking. Unfortunately I have no software available to check the CMYK-values within the pdf, but I suspect, that the linked part (right side) no longer shows the values used in constructing (5/100/80/0). Any ideas whether this is a bug or whether I am doing something wrong are very welcome... Simpletest.afpub Simpletest.pdf Middle.afpub